Presenting “Accelerating DevOps Using Data Virtualization” at #C16LV

DevOps (a clipped compound of "development" and "operations") is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software, can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

…but the idea behind DevOps, of building, testing, and releasing software more rapidly and reliably is simply amazing and utterly necessary.

As system complexity has increased, as application functionality has ballooned, and as the cost of production downtime has skyrocketed, writing and testing code leaves one a long way from the promised land of published and deployed production code.

As explained by DevOps visionaries like Gene Kim, the biggest barrier to that promised land is data, in the form of databases cloned from production for development and testing, in the form of application stacks cloned from production systems for development and testing.

The amount of time wasted waiting for data on which to develop or test dwarfs the amount of time spent developing or testing. Consequently, IT has learned to be satisfied with only occasional refreshes of dev/test systems from production, resulting in humorously inadequate dev/test systems, and that has been the norm.

There is a new norm in town.

Data virtualization, like server virtualization, breaks through the constraint. Over the past 10 years, IT has learned to wallow in the freedom of server virtualization, using tools like VMware and OpenStack to provision virtual machines for any purpose.

Here is a thought-provoking question: why doesn’t every individual developer and tester have their own private full systems stack? Why can’t they have several of them, one or more for each task on which they’re working?

I can literally hear all of the other BTOM’s scoffing at that question: “Nobody has that much infrastructure, you idiot!”